“Were you desirous of seeing combat?”
“Yes sir, I have always wanted to see combat. I had been trained so
much and I had never seen combat and to be truthful with you, I felt
like a phoney. I had instructed people who went on to serve in Vietnam
and saw them come back and some that didn’t...I felt like the Salvation
Army band. I’ve seen so many go and I’ve related so many ‘sea stories’
and that’s all that it had ever been and, yes, I wanted to see combat.”
- Testimony of Robert “Reds” Helmey, November 19, 1969
Helmey’s testimony may partly explain why he hijacked an airliner to Cuba
and announced his intention to kill Fidel Castro, but it doesn’t explain
everything.
Helmey was arrested on the tarmac at Jose Marti International Airport
in Havana and taken to a Cuban prison. He was to spend 103 days there,
in a cell the approximate size of a bathroom. He measured the time with
marks scratched into the wall of his cell. He was kept in solitary
confinement. He saw no other prisoners.
During his time there, Helmey subsisted on a diet of hard bread in the
morning and rice and frijoles at night. At the end of 103 days, he had
lost 50 pounds. He became gravely ill and while he was in the hospital,
a guard emptied his rifle chamber and, smiling, showed Helmey a bullet
with his name scratched into it.
Helmey was the object of propoganda missions by the Cuban G2 Security
Police, the Cuban version of the CIA. They brought him books — Fidel Castro’s
“History Will Absolve Me,” others by Karl Marx, Che Guevara, Mao Tse-tung
and Kim II Sung, and books about the economic history of Cuba. They
took him
to a nightclub to show him how happy the Cuban people were.
They also toyed with him. On his second night in Cuba, guards took him
from his cell in the middle of the night. They drove him to an isolated
location
and told him to get out of the car. Then they told him to walk. Helmey
refused.
Another guard told him again in broken English to walk. Again Helmey refused.
“If you’re going to shoot me, you will have to shoot me looking at you,” Helmey said.
They put him back in the car and took him back to the prison.
Throughout the ride home, Helmey sat quietly in the back seat, turning
over in his mind the realization that if he had walked, he would have been
killed.
A parade of Security Police came and went and asked him questions.
He told them all he would speak only to Fidel. When they asked him why
he
wanted to see Fidel, he would not tell them.
He told them all, over and over again in response to all their questions,
that all he
wanted was to go home. On the 66th day, St. Patrick’s Day, he missed Savannah
more keenly than ever. By the 71st day he told his captors he would go
home in
a rowboat if they would let him.
On the 78th day he heard a man in the cell beneath him. He hollared to
the man and they began to talk. The man was Carl Davidson, a Black
Panther. Helmey communicated with another man by tapping on a conduit
pipe. This man was also a hijacker, but had wanted to get to Cuba to
become part of the revolution.
On the 103rd day, a guard came to Helmey’s cell.
“Helmey, you travel today,” the guard said.
“Where?” Helmey asked.
“Do not ask me questions,” the guard said.
He gave Helmey clothes and $50. Helmey refused the money.
“You complicate things, Helmey,” the guard said. “Take the money.”
Helmey took the $50, but resolved to not spend any of it and to return
it when he got to wherever they were sending him.
At the Port of Havana, Cuban police put him aboard the sugar ship
Commandant Camilleo Cienfuegos along with 15 other passengers, mostly
American, and one Canadian couple. Otherwise, but for crew the ship was
empty. The ship set sail two days later.
Helmey saw his country for the first time in 107 days as Miami came
into view over the bow of the ship. But they sailed on past, up the coast,
all the way to Montreal, Canada, and Helmey would have to wait a little
longer.
When the ship docked in Montreal, Helmey turned himself in to the
American Consulate. After almost four months Helmey finally set foot on
American soil when he was turned over to FBI agents in Plattsburgh, New
York. He would now face trial in the United States.
After a hard-won change of venue from Miami to Savannah, Helmey was
interviewed by a battery of psychiatrists, some of whom worked for the
government. All declared he had been temporarily insane at the time of
the hijacking as a result of three consecutive concussions he had
suffered in three years, the last a month before the hijacking.
Even Corbett Thigpen, the famed psychiatrist who co-penned the
groundbreaking study of schizophrenia “The Three Faces of Eve,” in a
signed deposition read before the court identified the “mental break”
Helmey suffered because of the concussions as the cause of the hijacking.
The trial lasted for one week. The jury heard from defense witnesses
who testified one after another to the fineness of Helmey’s character
and the purity of his motives — his father, his preacher, old friends
like Sonny Seiler and Captain Thomas Close, who drove Helmey to the
airport, and Helmey’s unit commander Major Logan B. Dixon, Jr., who
described Helmey as a “good soldier and quite patriotic.”
Even the two psychiatrists called for the prosecution testified to Helmey’s patriotism.
“He wanted to alleviate what he felt was an immediate danger to his country,”
said Dr. Harold Fain, Assistant Chief of Psychiatry at the United States
Medical
Center in Springfield, Missouri.
After closing arguments, U.S. District Judge Alexander A. Lawrence
instructed the jury and sent them away to deliberate.
Helmey and his attorney Fred Clark walked across the street to a
restaurant directly behind the Courthouse to have a bite to eat and
settle in for the long wait for a verdict. They had barely sat down to
their lunch when two Federal Marshalls came rushing in to tell them the
judge wanted them back in the courtroom immediately. The jury had
reached a verdict.
Back in the courtroom, as Helmey waited for the verdict to be read, he
had to remind himself to breathe.
“Read the verdict,” Judge Lawrence said.
The marshall unfolded the paper in his hand.
“Innocent by reason of temporary insanity on all counts,” the marshall
said.
The jury had reached the verdict in 15 minutes.
Breathing now and teary-eyed with relief, Helmey hugged his attorney,
then stationed himself to shake each juror’s hand as they left the jury
box.
The last juror out of the box was an elderly man. He shook Helmey’s hand
warmly.
“What this country needs is more men like you,” the man said.
........................
Helmey walked out of the courthouse a free man. The trial was over, but
for every question answered in that courtroom, more lingered unanswered.
Join us tomorrow for the conclusion of our four-part series, in which we
examine
some of these questions in detail, and review Helmey’s life since his acquittal.